


levitation ain’t your only friend

by therm0dynamics



Series: the city of angels [2]
Category: True Detective
Genre: (kinda), Drug Use, Drug-Induced Sex, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 10:07:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4517790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therm0dynamics/pseuds/therm0dynamics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And yeah, Ray had never been the paragon of temperance and self-control, but this time it seemed he didn’t more fall off the wagon than take a running swan dive off the back end.</p><p>(or, ray’s bender and the resulting comedown)</p>
            </blockquote>





	levitation ain’t your only friend

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【翻译】levitation ain’t your only friend不孤](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10350363) by [liangdeyu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liangdeyu/pseuds/liangdeyu)



> (did i write more smutty nonsense answer is yes did anyone ask for this answer is absolutely n o t)
> 
> so i know very little about drugs, but i feel like there’d be at least SOME adverse side effects from that massive binge ray went on in ep. 6 … like you can’t just come down from that shit that quickly …… right?
> 
> title from “uncle johnny” by the killers. set mid-2.06. tw: drugs, self-harm, and more drugs. oh and apparently ray’s wife is named gena now, not alicia, so that’s what i’m gonna call her!

The phone shrills at just past three in the morning and jolts Frank Semyon out of an impending nightmare.

He’d been - he’d been wading. Drudging knee-deep in a floodplain of murky water toward a distant ridge of mountains, but never getting any closer. Trees bare of leaves floating weightlessly by, a strangling fog wrapping around him. The sky raining down charcoal. And a hovering feeling that something unseen and vague was slowly inching up on him - to what end exactly, he can’t recall, because before he even opens his eyes, it’s already evaporated.

He dreams often, but rarely remembers any specifics. It’s probably for the best.

The phone shrieks again, the lit-up screen overbright, searing his eyes. Jordan rolls over restlessly beside him and mutters something ungracious into her pillow. Frank doesn’t catch if it’s about him or about the caller, but either way he can’t really blame her. He runs an affectionate hand through her long tangled hair as he reaches over to grab his phone and mute the call.

Caller ID: Velcoro, Raymond.

He answers.

“Velcoro, what the hell,” Frank growls. He’s not exactly obliged to be the most amicable version of himself, not at this time of night.

“Frank oh Christ Frank I made the call I think I fucked it up Frank I fucked up _bad_ \- ”

Accompanying the illegible stream of words is a wall of noise he can’t identify, and almost immediately Frank’s awake as day.

“Slow down,” Frank snaps, tossing the sheets off himself and sitting up on the edge of his bed. “ _Coherence_ , Raymond.”

“Oh God I think I’m gonna throw up no I think I’m gonna _die_ ,” Ray slurs.

Something hollow and cold opens in his chest. He pictures Ray lying sprawled on the floor of a dark room that looks like Caspere’s sordid den of iniquity, a faceless gunman standing over him. Except this time around it’s not a riot gun loaded with rubber buckshot pointed at him and he’s got it a _hell_ of a lot worse than just nasty bruises and broken ribs.

“Are you hurt? Where are you?” Frank flicks the lights on and mouths _sorry_ to Jordan and drops a quick kiss to her cheek. He pulls clothes from his closet at random, feeling like he’s not moving nearly fast enough.

“I don’t know it looks like my house but there’s glass everywhere and a bike on the couch for some reason I don’t remember putting it there - ”

“ _Are you hurt?_ ” he insists.

“There’s blood everywhere I don’t know if it’s mine ‘cause I can’t feel anything Frank I feel so great _I’m dynamite T.N.T. and I’ll win the fight_ \- ”

Frank holds the phone away from his ear as a loud whoop pierces through the speaker. And then he realizes - Ray’s _singing_. He listens closer. That’s Metallica or Led Zepplin or whatever trash music it is he likes blaring in the background. And Ray screaming along off-key and out of time.

He feels the cold grip release its hold on his stomach and simmering anger take its place. Anger tempered with something gentler, something that makes him close his eyes for a moment and let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding in.

Thank God, he wants to say, but instead he yells, “Jesus _fuck_ , Raymond, what did you do?” 

“I gave up I made the call and now he’s gone and she’s gone I’m never gonna see ‘em again Frank.”

Frank can put two and two together. Clearly something _adverse_ had happened in the ongoing cold war between Ray and Gena. And now he’s high out of his fucking mind on booze and blow, it sounded like.

“Jesus Christ it’s a thousand degrees in here everything hurts I think I’m about to have a heart attack.”

Yeah. Definitely cocaine. 

“Ray? Listen. Just stay where you are. I’ll be over.” He waits for Ray’s faintly slurred affirmation, then ends the call.

“Frank, is he okay?” Jordan asks, fully awake and propped up on one arm.

“Yeah. Fine. Operating at his usual level of idiocy,” Frank says. “Go back to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.” He kisses her again and pulls on his jacket. As an afterthought, he considers the handgun sitting in the top drawer of his dresser, but leaves it. It’s just Ray.

“Be nice,” Jordan says, and rolls over and pulls the covers over her head.

"Yeah," Frank says, and turns the lights off and grabs his keys and goes.

\--

He perpetrates more than a couple moving violations on his way over to Vinci, jumping lights and skimming thirty above the speed limit the whole way.

He’s still seething. Ray had made a commitment to sobriety, which was the primary reason he’d been allowed to work security at Vinci Gardens and the Lux in the first place. Then he goes and pulls a fucking stunt like this. And yeah, Ray had never been the paragon of temperance and self-control, but this time it seemed he didn’t more fall off the wagon than take a running swan dive off the back end.

Then Frank remembers the talk they had in his kitchen earlier that day. Early morning. The smell of black coffee and gun oil hanging in the cold air. Holding drinks in one hand. Mutually assured destruction in the other. Ray looking at him with flat dead betrayal in his eyes.

The choice to kill the man had been Ray’s own, had been in him since the day he learned about right and wrong. Frank would swear by that. Hand on heart. And he’d be lying if he said their _arrangement_ , one-sided as it might’ve been, hadn’t reaped its benefits. 

But it’d been twelve years. And in that time, Ray had had plenty of chances to turn on him, to ask for an out or make one for himself, consequences be damned, but he never had. He just promised he’d do right by his wife and child and put his head down and waited for Frank to say _I absolve you of this debt_. Not like Blake, that fucking rat, Ray possessed true loyalty. Loyalty that bespoke decency. Morality.

Which left Frank as the hypocrite. He’d spoken of justice, but he’d set Ray down a long and twisting path toward self-immolation because he’d been _sloppy_. Because he hadn’t done the simplest fucking thing and checked a piece of intel, made sure it was solid, before passing it on. Where was the justice in that?

An unfamiliar feeling settles in the pit of his stomach. Guilt. He’s never had much occasion for guilt. It’d been too ponderous a thing to carry around back when he needed to move quick or die, and it still was today. Maybe even more so.

Frank thinks: what if Ray’s luck had tipped just a fraction in the other direction. What if he’d bled out in that West Hollywood hellhole. It would’ve been days before anyone found his body.

He clocks the forty-five minute drive in just under half the time.

\--

The door to Ray’s shitty single-story rowhouse hangs ajar, a single beam of light shining out into the yard like a hand grasping for help.

Frank invites himself in and walks into a blast zone: every surface glimmering with broken glass, model airplanes littering the ground - casualties of war - not a single piece of furniture upright or in its place. There is indeed a bike on the couch. The stench of tequila and smoke and vomit saturates the air.

And then a shiver of warning runs through him and he looks up and Ray’s standing at ground zero of the wreckage, stripped down to his undershirt, blood coating his arms. Levelling a gun right at him.

Frank freezes, but inwardly he’s almost laughing. He’d _just_ told Ray the next time Ray was gonna stick him up at gunpoint he’d better not see it coming. Well. Irony was a bitch.

“What are you doing here, Frank? You here to kill me?” Ray accuses. Paranoid. The gun wavers and dips in his hands. Agitated. He sights down the barrel, a manic gleam in his eyes. Stumbling toward the edge of a massive comedown.

Frank puts his hands up slowly. This was exactly why he hated pushing drugs. Cocaine in particular. It was a shame people sought it out, that euphoric numbness, that invincibility and instability.

“I’m not here to do anything. Just checking in on you. Put the gun down.”

“Against the wall,” Ray instructs. Frank takes three steps back in the cramped room and feels his back hit the wall. Ray darts forward, quickly pats him down for weapons. His knuckles are badly scraped - which still didn’t explain the rest of the blood. Frank mentally thanks his good judgment for leaving his weapon at home. “Over.” And Frank goes chest to the wall. Ray's hands run down his sides, his back, over his hips, down each leg.

“Am I free to go now, officer?” he deadpans. Ray nods and retreats, but keeps the gun trained dead on Frank’s chest. Center of mass. Shoot to kill. Fucking _cops_. He forces himself to stay calm. “Now can you put your gun down?”

A moment of dead stillness. Then Ray slowly turns the barrel of his weapon, brings it up and rests the muzzle right under the crook of his jaw. Frank feels ice crackle through his veins.

“Raymond, don’t you dare,” he breathes, inching toward Ray with his hands up. Glass crackles underfoot, the only audible sound other than Ray’s heavy, labored breathing. The music’s long since stopped. The lamp throws odd shadows from where it lies sideways on the ground, turning the room into a freakish hallucinatory world. The tepid air sits heavy and still.

He’s halfway across the room now and Ray hasn’t moved.

He’s five feet away now and Ray hasn’t moved.

Four. Three. Two. One.

He gently removes the gun from Ray’s unresisting hand, racks the slide - unloaded, thank _fuck_ \- ejects the mag, throws the pieces into the disaster consuming the rest of the room.

There’s a sudden weight on his chest as Ray clutches onto his jacket and all but collapses against him. Frank quickly loops an arm over Ray’s shoulders to keep them both standing. Ray’s still shaking badly, fine tremors shivering through him - and Frank realizes he’s silently sobbing. Hesitantly, he reaches up and presses Ray’s face to his chest, feels the damp of sweat and tears soak into his shirt.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry,” Ray chokes out, over and over.

“It’s alright, it’s okay,” Frank says. He doesn’t know how long they stand there - five minutes, ten minutes - but gradually Ray’s breathing evens out. Frank carefully disentangles himself and starts shepherding Ray toward the bedroom. His turn to clean up the mess.

\-- 

In the relative calm of the bedroom, Ray’s emotional turmoil transforms into physical restlessness. He sits at the foot of his bed, edgy and fidgeting, running his hand over his mouth, through his hair, twisting and untwisting his fingers, toying with the sheets, with his shirt. Frank sits on a chair across from him, cleaning Ray's cuts and, with patience he hadn’t known he possessed, extracting his story piece by piece.  

It starts with the state-sanctioned visit supervised by the world's most passive-aggressive social worker and Chad’s utter apathy to his continued presence in his life. It detours through a bottle of top-shelf tequila, a six-pack of beer, a pack of cigarettes, and an eightball of blow - half of it in him and the rest still piled up, a little snowdrift on his coffee table. It ends with a phone call to Gena, who’d wilfully ignored how fucked up he’d been in the interest of cutting him out of Chad’s life for good, and then a phone call to Frank, who hadn’t and was now here.

“Rough night, huh?” Frank murmurs, dabbing a washcloth up Ray’s arms. The blood on his hands had come from punching through the windows, but the long shallow scratches up his arms are entirely self-inflicted.

“All these things were crawling through my veins, Frank,” Ray says, continuing to pick at his skin. “Tried to scratch ‘em out but they’re in my head now. Got the worst fucking headache.”

“Should've considered that before,” Frank says, batting Ray’s hands away and bandaging his arms with what he’d scavenged out of the medicine cabinet - well-stocked on illegally obtained pills, missing basically everything else. God knows how this man kept himself alive. “You bump two grams of rail all by yourself, you’re gonna crash. Hard. That’s simple causality.”

“You sleep in a suit or something?” Ray asks, reaching out and tugging at the collar of Frank’s shirt. Frank sighs. He’s shed his jacket somewhere and cuffed his sleeves to the elbows, but he’s still covered in sweat and blood and snot and tears and not a small amount of alcohol and cocaine. None of it his.

“Raymond, you don’t wake me up at three in the morning to question my sartorial choices - would you _stop_ that? Christ,” Frank hisses, knocking Ray’s scratching fingers away from where they’re digging into his collarbone.

“Hurts.”

“What hurts?”

“My skin. My chest. Everything.” He tugs at his beater. Frank bites back a groan and gestures for him to put his arms up. Was this what raising a child was like, he wonders as he helps Ray strip off his shirt, then his pants. Just, you know, less drugs. Ideally.

In the jaundiced cast of the ceiling light, Ray looks pale and sick, breathing too fast and too shallow. Frank reaches forward, tucks two fingers just under Ray's jaw at his pulse point where the gun had been not half an hour before. Feels his heart hammering, hammering, hammering away. He unfurls the rest of his fingers, curling them gently around Ray’s neck. Ray lets out a pained noise at the touch. His skin is feverish and clammy and sweat-slick, his heartbeat slamming against Frank’s palm.

Small wonder Ray thinks he’s dying. His body’s been going at fight-or-flight speed for hours now, running itself down hard.

Theoretically, he could just knock Ray out with a tab or two of the Xanax he’d seen in the medicine cabinet or dose him with the weed and booze he knows is lying around. It'd bring him down quicker, but he decides against it. At this point, mixing any more chemicals into the toxic sludge already coursing through Ray’s bloodstream is more risk than reward. There isn't much he can do except get him comfortable and help him ride it out.

Frank frowns as he rubs lightly over Ray’s collarbone, where angry red scratch marks are starting to appear. Ray closes his eyes, letting out a shaking sigh like he's _this_ close to getting off on that light touch alone.

Whatever it is, Frank realizes, going very still, it's not pain he’s feeling.

Ray’s half-hard, which isn't a physiological reaction from the cocaine. Judging by the way he’s writhing around, desperate for tactile stimulation, his coke had likely been cut with E, X, whatever the fuck the rave junkies called it these days.

Well, _shit_. Better and better.

“I’m gonna go get you a wet towel and some ice water,” Frank says. “And then you’re gonna lie down and take a nap, alright?”

In response, Ray clamps a hand around his wrist, tugging backwards, drawing him up and out of the chair. Keeps drawing back until he’s lying flat on the bed and Frank’s kneeling over him, braced on one arm.

“You’re high as a fucking kite, Raymond,” Frank says. ‘Cause he knows what this is - and he could easily resist, and he _should_ , but something stops him. He’s not sure what. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I know exactly what I'm doing. And I know this ain't anywhere we haven't been before,” Ray says. “And I know you owe me at least this much.”

Guilt. That’s what’s stopping him from stopping this.

He looks at Ray lying beneath him - strung-out and crazed, hair falling in his face, eyes dark as night but focused with a burning intensity. Ray, who spent twelve years repaying his debts, all because of nothing, all for nothing. And now, at the end of things, holding a gun to his own fucking head, tearing himself bloody with hurt and want, wordlessly begging the man who’d led him astray for the easiest thing in the world to give. Comparatively.

‘Cause that was life, right. Equilibrium. Give and take. Only Ray hadn’t known much of the latter and entirely too much of the former.

"Yeah," Frank says. And he pulls his wrist free and drops to his elbows and pushes his thigh between Ray's legs. The act of absolution.

And Ray grits his teeth and bucks his hips up hard and dirty against his leg, desperately swearing and whimpering and gasping for breath like he's dying. Frank runs his fingers down Ray’s neck again, then dips into the hollow of his throat, down his sternum, fanning his hands across his ribs, speckled now with small smooth scars from the masked rifleman.

“C'mon, good, that's it,” Frank urges, moving down against Ray, giving him some friction to grind on. It's not gonna last long, not with how he's already so keyed up and hypersensitive. This whole situation feels strangely surreal, like he's moving through water, like his nightmare world's back with a vengeance. Him mostly clothed, Ray almost naked, rutting on each other like this could change anything, past or future.

Ray has one hand clenched in the sheets but Frank gradually notices he’s taken his other and started clawing at himself again, repetitive scratch marks up his leg.

“Jesus fuck, cut that _out_ ,” Frank snaps, and grabs Ray’s wrists and pins them to his sides. Something dark and vicious suddenly comes over him and he snarls and sinks his teeth right into the crook of Ray’s neck and rolls his hips down hard. Ray’s eyes go wide, and he thrashes futilely for a second before tensing up and coming with a broken moan.

Frank pauses a moment, moves over to sit next to Ray on the narrow bed, then looks down at himself and grimaces. Yeah. Sure. What’s one more bodily fluid on top of all that other shit already on him. Next to him, Ray’s sprawled flat out - still too warm and breathing hard, but calmer at least.

“Feel better?” Frank asks.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ray exhales. “Do you - you need - ?" He fumbles in Frank's general direction but Frank deflects him with a heavy sigh. You don't owe me anything anymore, he wants to say. Least of all this.

"Don't worry about me," he says instead, and spreads his arms out over the headboard and crosses his legs at the ankle. "You gotta fucking stop doing this to _yourself_. You promised."

"Yeah. I fucked up. I know. But Gena - and Chad - I wasn't thinking straight." 

"You know what hamartia is?" Frank looks over. Ray has the look he always has when confronted with vocabulary beyond a high-school level. Plebeian. "It's a weakness. A fatal flaw. The old Greek writers, they thought we all had one. Yours, Raymond, would be a chronic lack of impulse control."

"Something else I was born with, huh? That and the desire to kill, apparently,” Ray says. But he hardly sounds bitter. Just amused and resigned. “Good thing you’ll always be there to vindicate me.”

Vindication. Yeah. The way things are headed with this doomed investigation, Frank thinks, he seriously doubts even that much can happen.

\--

By some monumental effort of will, he manages to shove Ray into the shower and get him cleaned off. Then he stays close for another hour or so, righting the furniture and picking up the worst of the mess, until Ray falls into a fitful sleep. 

Frank feels only marginally apologetic for leaving. He knows Ray well enough to know that the last thing he'd want upon awakening is someone hovering over him like a goddamn nurse. And no doubt he'll feel like hell warmed over when he does regain consciousness, but hey. He's proved he knows how to use a phone once already.

By the time he gets back home, the sky is fading from navy into pale gold. Jordan's half-awake and stumbling around the kitchen with the disgruntled expression that only a night owl could achieve at six in the morning. 

He goes in for a kiss, but she grimaces and pushes him away.

"Shower. You smell like a cheap brothel," she says, wrinkling her nose. "Is that _cocaine_ on your jacket?"

"You would not believe the shit Ray put me through," he mutters.

"Is that who he is this week? Just Ray?" She smiles.

In the first month they'd been together, Frank had tried uselessly to explain to her exactly what Ray _was_ to him - an enforcer, a fixer, a friend, an easy fuck, all of the above - until she'd patted him kindly on the shoulder.

"Whatever you need him to be, you do need him," she'd said. "That's okay. But don't you _dare_ think of me any differently."

He loves her for that, for always calling him on bullshit. From day one she'd seen straight through him. Frank lives in a world of bargaining and prevarication. She deals only in hard and ugly truths. That's what he needs most of all.

"Hey," she says as he heads to the bathroom. "You better tip the dry cleaners extra this week. God knows what else you've got all over you. _They_ shouldn't have to put up with that."

Friends like these, he thinks with a half-smile. You could almost forget about everyone else.

**Author's Note:**

> the song ray was singing is “t.n.t.” by ac/dc. apologies to to anyone monitoring my recent internet search history, i know so much about cocaine now and also please don’t arrest me. ANYWAY, i hope you enjoyed this, please let me know what you think!!


End file.
